Thursday, May 31, 2012

﻿Next Friday I'll give an experimental presentation at Noise=Noise on the strange parallels between the sonic and conceptual dystopianism of Doctor Who and first generation British industrial music. Dr. Who exposed mass audiences (often very young) to a combination of experimental electronic sound and dystopian themes, a combination that could also summarise industrial music. Dr. Who frequently presented post-apocalyptic scenarios of mutation, mind control and para-militarised societies and, in the process, at least implicitly criticised actual political and technological developments of the time, particularly those associated with the Cold War arms race. Due to budgetary constraints these visionary scenarios were often realised in a rudimentary ad hoc fashion; an approach that also applies to industrial. The early industrial groups highlighted the most serious social and political themes using very primitive electronic equipment, creating a kind of “D.I.Y. monumentalism” that nevertheless had a wide and terrifying cultural impact. Sonically, the Dr. Who soundtracks produced by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1960s and 70s can now be heard as direct precursors of industrial and examples of this link will be presented. The way in which they encoded socio-technological terrors electronically could even support a classification of these soundtracks a type of proto-industrial music, itself dependent on some of industrial’s other precursors: Futurism, Bruitism and Musique Concréte.

Alexei Monroe will discuss the current plight and possible (but far from certain) future of European culture. He will analyse the ways in which various artists and musicians have envisioned Europe and its troubled history and the political and cultural consequences of the almost total failure of the European political class to build a visionary trans-European culture. This failure has left Europe at the mercy of "Euro-cidal" forces on both the right and the left. The cultural question is not the added or unaffordable luxury that authoritarian Marxists and neoliberal ideologues would have us believe and needs to be addressed urgently and courageously. Current events lead us to face hard questions: is there a possibility for a trans-European cultural response to the crisis and the tragic beauties of Europe's cultural heritage and what hope is there for a European cultural resurgence?